Director Shimit Amin’s instinctive love for the underdog and screenwriter Jaideep Sahni’s seeming distaste for Big Business come together in Rocket Singh – a movie that is as perceptive and entertaining as it is naïve and predictable. It’s Rocky for the Generation Sell that pits corporate rapacity against homespun entrepreneurship. Ranbir Kapoor plays Hapreet – a barely-adequate everyman who tries to make his way through modern professional landscape – with great intelligence, internalizing the character’s religious repression, his lack of parental identification and the subsequent absence of retributive masculinity. Amin’s cheesecake aesthetic, on the other hand, recalls Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright in equal measure, with its geometric mise en scène, affinity for strong horizontals, the easy-on-the-eye symmetric composition, shrewd visual detailing and, especially, the sprightly editing, which telescopes actions with split second shots while letting conversations take their own pace. The office and its peripheral spaces are moral zones in Rocket Singh that define and delimit character behaviour. The workplace here is a veritable battle field – a characteristically male playground – fraught with surveillance and territorial dispute. (The cubicles’ layout itself reminds us of trench warfare.) The film succeeds in conveying to a good extent the crushing power of concentrated capital. And Amin is capable of fine subtlety, as is clear from the honesty and pronounced everyday quality of some of the sequences. But he is equally prone to repetition and overemphasis. Rocket Singh is a film that wants to put a human face on commercial enterprise, and it’s unable to understand corporate ruthlessness without putting grimacing human faces on to it. It appears to be unaware that modern offices are exactly what it laments they aren’t – employee-friendly, customer-oriented and rewarding of new ideas. Perhaps it makes for better drama this way. But it also immunizes its object of critique by characterizing its fallibility as product of human misconduct – big businesses are corrupt because the people running them are. Hapreet advices his boss towards the end: “Business is not numbers, business is people.” Guess what, that’s what every CEO says too.

PS: I admit I had fun throughout trying to guess what colour turban Ranbir Kapoor will come wearing next.

What struck me most about Anurag Kashyap’s unanimously derided Bombay Velvet was how thoroughly unoriginal it is. Right from the history of Bombay-that-might-have-been to the black eye that Johnny (Ranbeer Kapoor) carries, the film builds a relentlessly artificial world far from the realist trappings of Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). The universe of Bombay Velvet is media-saturated, drowned in cinematic codes that paint a portrait of the city as a jarring mix of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York movies. So this reimagining of Bombay as a sort of Hollywoodized America has as a welcome and perhaps unintended consequence of defamiliarizing the city, giving it a new foundational myth akin to that of America at the turn of last century – a perennially rootless territory that actively erases traces of its past, a new world for those who wish to cast off their social identities and chase a new dream and a promised land of real estate rush and hedonist abandon. The lasting effect, however, is that of a simulacrum, a Disneyland. It all finally has the air of a cinephilic wish fulfillment project that imagines how great it would have been had Scorsese made a film on Bombay. Films as cinephilic navel-gazing is not new and there is nothing wrong about them either, but this one comes across less like a cinephile infusing his material with his movie loves than him incarnating his movie loves through indifferent material. When he cites Raoul Walsh, it feels less like a tribute to his formative movie experiences than a tribute to Scorsese paying tribute to his formative movie experiences. This kind of double quotation completely erases Kashyap’s authorship, but not in any subversive way. But this was to be expected of a generation of filmmakers fed on New Hollywood. The Movie Brats, thanks partly to the French New Wave, plundered classical cinema for personal use and emptied its signifiers of any meaning outside cinephilia. And films that tend to pillage these already pillaged films are very likely to come out the way Bombay Velvet has. One gets the feeling Kashyap would perhaps have liked to belong to Scorsese’s generation. The lament is understandable: it is desirable to have grown up on cinema than cinephilia.